‘On August 6, Short’s planned moving day, she was found shot to death alongside her three children, her husband, and their dog in the family’s Pennsylvania home. A “murder/suicide note” was found “near one of the deceased adults,”

Megan Short, 33, posted a request to Facebook, asking for help moving on August 6. Only weeks earlier, she had commented under an article posted by a friend, saying she was leaving her husband.

The article, written by Leigh Stein, was titled, “He didn’t hit me. It was still abuse.” In it, Stein explained that, while working at a diner, her boyfriend made her shower twice a day, so she “wouldn’t smell like French fries after work” and so that she could shave her entire body, “or else he wouldn’t touch me.”

He also told Stein she “wasn’t sexy” and that, therefore, he needed to sleep with other women. Stein didn’t see her relationship as abusive, at the time, because her abuse was invisible — there were no bruises to prove it. “I didn’t know what to name what I couldn’t see,” she writes.

Like so many other women, Stein had learned that red flags were, in fact, “romance.” She writes, “I felt like I was in a movie — how quickly we moved in together and isolated ourselves from friends and family, because all we needed was each other.” Women are groomed to become victims of abuse, in this way. Continue reading “Abuse is not always ‘Visible’ as Megan Short was Punished by Death for Realizing”